This application claims the priority of European patent document 06 004 754.5, filed Mar. 8, 2006, the disclosure of which is expressly incorporated by reference herein.
The invention relates to a method and apparatus for transferring a Galileo overbound or an ICAO overbound to a pairwise overbound with excess mass (POEM).
For Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) based navigation systems for aviation, it must be assured that the position the system provides has sufficient integrity. This means that the probability that the navigation system supplies hazardously misleading information (HMI) should be proven to remain extremely small under all circumstances. The problem of trying to guarantee that such a system offers sufficient integrity is known as the overbounding problem, because practical solutions are necessarily conservative (bounding) with respect to the performance that is actually obtained. Further, Safety-of-life (SoL) GNSS augmentation systems must provide bounds on the probability that hazardous navigation errors may occur.
The integrity information sent to the user contains no explicit provisions for protecting against biases. Instead users are sent protection factors that correspond to zero-mean error distributions. The users combine the received protection factors using their own local knowledge to calculate protection levels that correspond to their position estimate. The broadcast protection factors must be sufficient such that any individual user has only a small probability (e.g. less than a one in ten million), for each approach, that their true position error exceeds the calculated protection level. The ground system for instance must guarantee these protection factors without knowing precisely where the users are, or which satellite they observe.
For determining the system's integrity, errors in the range domain are transformed into errors in the position domain. During the transformation of the errors in the range domain into the errors in the position domain, the corresponding error statistics (probability distribution functions of the errors) are transformed by the convolution which is necessary for such transformation.
In the literature, several different overbounding concepts are known. One of these concepts is the Galileo overbounding as defined by the Galileo requirements. Another concept is the paired overbounding with excess mass (POEM). The Galileo overbounding has the disadvantage that it is not preserved during convolution, whereas the POEM is preserved during convolution. That means that the convolution of two excess mass overbounding distributions will overbound the convolution of the two original convolutions. Thus, the paired overbounding concept effectively relates range domain and position domain overbounding.